A fine crop of frogs

We have an assortment of rain barrels outside and earlier in the summer, we were nightly serenaded by a Gray Tree Frog rattling away. It didn’t seem likely he’d manage to call in a mate, but unbeknownst to us we were hosting orgies and in a few weeks the barrels and every other container with a few inches of standing water was full of eggs and, soon, tadpoles.

They scrubbed the barrels clean of algae and as they transformed, wiped out the mosquito larvae that usually plague us.

And now they’re growing up and moving out on their own. Despite these pictures, the color of the barrels doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the frogs’ color. The ones in the dark barrels are developing faster, though.